Free A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein Page B

didn’t see it, I really didn’t. And I was, I think, close enough to her to have seen it.”
    Detachment from politics was not the Wellesley way. Polite participation was. During Hillary’s freshman year, she eased into the leadership of the Wellesley Young Republicans club, and by the end of the second semester was elected its president. Meanwhile she had begun questioning her party’s policies on civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Barry Goldwater had been defeated for president in her last year of high school. Now she found herself moving toward the distinctly liberal (and minority wing) of the party. Her alienation from her father seemed exacerbated in their few discussions and letters, as he became typically dismissive and antagonistic to her increasingly feminist, egalitarian, and antiwar assertions. She had also begun reading—and citing—the
New York Times,
much to his consternation.
    As a high school graduation present, Hillary’s church in Park Ridge had given each of its senior class members a subscription to
motive
magazine, the official publication of the Methodist Student Movement. Its views were far different from her customary sources of information. The magazine echoed the call of John Wesley and his disciples to faith-rooted social activism, but also contained provocative articles by New Left theoreticians including Carl Oglesby, who later became head of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Meanwhile, her ideas, old and new, were subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny as she came under the influence of professors whose outlooks were much less parochial than those of her teachers in Park Ridge, whether left or right, conservative or liberal. After a while, she would write later, her views were not Republican ones.
    Peter Edelman, who knew Hillary before she met his wife-to-be, Marian Wright Edelman, thought Hillary’s politics “reflected what you would expect in a certain kind of young person at the time…sort of on the liberal side. She was opposed to the war in Vietnam and she had a very instinctive interest in children’s issues that had already manifested itself” before she graduated from Wellesley. She had caused a slight stir on the campus when she brought a black classmate—one of only ten at the college—with her to church services in town, a week after classes began during her freshman year. “I was testing me as much as I was testing the church,” Hillary wrote to Don Jones. She appeared interested in her own motives, which was not something she often expressed curiosity about. For a person so focused on religion and spiritual notions, Hillary seemed to many acquaintances to be surprisingly devoid of introspective instinct, and when things went wrong, she habitually looked elsewhere for the reasons. It was only after she became a candidate for the Senate that she meaningfully acknowledged personal responsibility for the failure to reform health care during the Clinton presidency. She told Jones that, had she seen someone else make the same gesture a year earlier of taking a black classmate to an all-white church, she might have thought, “Look how liberal that girl is trying to be going to church with a Negro.”
    Once she had recovered her emotional equilibrium at Wellesley, fellow students, even those uncomfortable with her politics, were drawn to Hillary’s natural warmth, humor, and obvious ability to get the job done. There was something both generous and gracious about her character that made people like being around her. She possessed a seemingly unselfish ability to praise others, recognize their personal concerns, remember meaningful details about their lives. These elements figured in the willingness of many of Wellesley’s overprivileged young women to see Hillary as their leader, instead of other students whose prep school backgrounds they shared.
    She was also notably direct in almost everything she